Environmentalists and Anti-Whalers: ‘Pirates’, or Protectors

BEIJING â€" The battle between Japan’s “whale researchers” and anti-whaling groups has long been a furious one, often fought, precariously, between vessels heaving in icy seas.

But who here is the protector, who the pirate

This week a federal judge in the United States ruled Sea Shepherd, the anti-whaling group, was the “pirate,” overturning a lower court’s verdict in a suit brought by the whale researchers, the Institute of Cetacean Research in Japan. (The institute, set up in 1987, a year after an international moratorium on whaling took effect to protect fast-dwindling species, says it is a “whale research program” but environmentalists say it is involved in commercial whaling and its Web site says it engages in “whaling.”)

“You don’t need a peg leg or an eye patch” to be a pirate, ruled Chief Judge Alex Kozinski of the 9th Circuit, in an opinion dated Feb. 25 in Seattle. (The 9th Circuit is an appeals court that is one level below the Supreme Court, the highest court in the nation.)

“When you ram ships; hurl glass containers of acid; drag metal-reinforced ropes in the water to damage propellers and rudders; launch smoke bombs and flares with hooks; and point high-powered lasers at other ships, you are, without a doubt, a pirate, no matter how high-minded you believe your purpose to be,” the judge ruled, finding in favor of the Institute, which he described as “Japanese researchers who hunt whales in the Southern Ocean.”

The judge defined a pirate as someone involved in acts of violence on the high seas and, importantly, driven by “private” ends.

Here’s how the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea defines piracy, as cited by the judge: “illegal acts of violence or detention, or any ! act of depredation, committed for private ends by the crew or the passengers of a private ship . . . and directed . . . on the high seas, against another ship . . . or against persons or property on board such ship.”

The argument is of course more complicated than that (legal judgments usually are) but it does seem to raise the following important question: can environmentalists, who are working to protect their surroundings, be considered to be motivated merely by “private” ends Or is it a larger, “public” ends that drive them

The judge said in his ruling the issue had not been much studied. “Belgian courts, perhaps the only ones to have previously considered the issue, have held that environmental activism qualifies as a private end,” he wrote.

Unsurprisingly, the verdict is roiling environmentalists, with Sea Shepherd’s founder, Paul Watson, saying: “They are entitled to their opinion, but the Australian Federal Court deemed the Japanese (whalers) to be pirates.”

What do you think Can environmentalists fighting to protect our natural surroundings be considered pirates driven by private ends Are Sea Shepherd’s tactics too extreme As our environment degrades, might one day the degraders be the ones who find themselves branded “pirates” drive by “private ends”

The Limits of U.S. Aid to Syria’s Rebels

Rendezvous's editor, Marcus Mabry, speaks with correspondent Mark Landler on the White House's deliberations on what kind of aid to give forces fighting Bashar al-Assad, and how.

The Limits of U.S. Aid to Syria’s Rebels

Rendezvous's editor, Marcus Mabry, speaks with correspondent Mark Landler on the White House's deliberations on what kind of aid to give forces fighting Bashar al-Assad, and how.

Wages of Tamil Insurgency Paid by the Poor Left Behind

It appears that the Sri Lankan government had somehow forgotten about the existence of the mobile phone.

That was the blunder it made in 2009, when it launched the final onslaught deep into the territory of Tamil insurgents to end a 26-year-old civil war. It kept the news media and human rights organizations out of the war zone, and from the evidence that has emerged, it did not plan to leave many witnesses.

But over the last three years, video clips and photographs shot on mobile phones of the final months of the civil war have surfaced and what they show are executions of men, women and children whose limbs are bound, and the shelling of civilians by the Sri Lankan army.

The Sri Lankan government maintains that these images are ‘‘lies.’’ My latest Letter From India column is set against this background.

It is not as if the insurgents, the Tamil Tigers, were meek underdogs. Headed by Velupillai Prabhakaran, the Tigers were one of the most ruthless and dangerous terrorist organizations in the world, who lured or forced impoverished Tamils, including children â€" among them an unknown number of girls â€" into taking up arms. In the end they used their own people as human shields against the advancing Sri Lankan army.

The complicity of the Sri Lankan state and of the Tigers in the brutality of the civil war is well documented.

But there is a group that has gotten away â€" the Tamil expatriate middle class that had settled in affluent nations, and financed and supported the Tigers in the name of nationalism. As it so often happens, when the end of the revolution came, they were fine and it was the poor with no means of escaping their geography w! ho had become the body count.

As Niromi de Soyza, who joined the Tigers as an idealistic 17-year-old, hints in one of her chilling accounts of her experience as a female militant, from the late 1980s, the Tamil population of Sri Lanka, especially the poor, were tired of the war and disenchanted with the Tigers. But they had to content themselves with their repressive ‘‘liberators.’’

It is easy to fund nationalism when you are far away in the comfort of Britain or the United States, when you have no stake in the war, when you are not going to be used as a human shield and your daughter’s safety is not threatened. It is easy to sponsor the ‘‘liberators’’ who share your love for your language and your dream for it to have a permanent home, when your child is not going to battle with a cyanide capsule strung around her neck to ensure an ‘‘honorable’’ death if captured.

When the Tamil insurgency began, it was a middle-class movement, as such nationalistic movements oftn are at their inception. But in the 1980s, as the war intensified, the Tamil middle class migrated in huge numbers to India and to the West. Those who did not have the opportunity to escape were the ones who eventually became the bodies that gave gravitas to a middle-class movement.

Among the many heartbreaking photographs of the civil war, there is one that shows three early adolescent girls, just children, in the fatigues of the Tigers. They are looking straight into the camera with bright juvenile eyes. Where are they now What happened to them Did they grow up into happy young women in the glow of a family Hope they made it to the United States or Britain or Australia or India. Probably not.

Will Turkey Make Peace With the Kurds

LONDON â€" There is growing optimism that a ceasefire in Turkey’s three-decade war with Kurdish guerrillas will be declared to coincide with the Kurdish New Year in three weeks.

Under a draft plan reported on Wednesday, the rebel Kurdistan Workers’ Party (P.K.K.) would lay down its arms on March 21 and withdraw its forces from Turkish territory by August.

The potential for a breakthrough in ending the conflict, which has claimed 40,000 lives since 1984, came when the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan opened talks late last year with Abdullah Ocalan, the P.K.K.’s jailed leader.

Intelligence agents made a series of visits to the prison island of Imrali near Istanbul to negotiate with the former guerrilla chief, who was once Turkey’s most wanted man.

In their ltest visit, last weekend, they accompanied a delegation of Kurdish legislators from the Peace and Democracy Party (B.D.P.)

Selahattin Demirtas, the B.D.P. co-chairman, said this week that there was already a de facto ceasefire. The P.K.K. was not carrying out armed action and the Turkish army was not conducting significant military operations against the rebels.

He quoted a letter from Mr. Ocalan in which he expressed the belief that the process would lead to an eventual resolution of the Kurdish issue. “Neither we nor the state can abandon that process,” he quoted the letter as saying.

The P.K.K. has abandoned its previous demands for independence but continues to seek equal rights for Kurds within the Turkish state.

Mr. Erdogan meanwhile dramatically underlined his own good intentions by telling his parliamentary colleagues he was prepa! red to drink poison if it meant achieving peace.

There are reports that the P.K.K. is preparing to release 16 Turkish prisoners, possibly as early as this weekend, as part of the peace moves.

Mr. Ocalan has sought the backing of P.K.K. exiles in Europe for the peace initiative, as well as that of guerrilla fighters based in the north of Iraq.

Duran Kalkan, a senior P.K.K. commander based in Iraq, said this week that he is open to the idea of a prisoner release. “However, nobody should expect us to make a unilateral move.”

In what appeared to be a positive response to the peace moves, he told the Kurdish Firatnews: “If everybody does what is required to do, I can say on behalf of the P.K.K. that the Kurdish armed movement will never pose an obstacle to the democratization of Turkey and the solution of te Kurdish question.”

Eve Best Returns to the Globe, This Time as a Director

LONDONâ€"The recent press conference announcing the 2013 season at Shakespeare’s Globe on one level seemed like variations on an ongoing theme.

A onetime Falstaff at this address, Roger Allam, is returning to open the season as Prospero in “The Tempest,” directed by Jeremy Herrin, while the perennial favorite, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” will be seen in May in a new staging, this time from the Globe artistic director Dominic Dromgoole. The 2011 Olivier winner Michelle Terry (“Tribes”) will play Titania.

The international season that so galvanized the space for six weeks last spring will return in a greatly pared-down form, and there will be three new plays, including one, “Blue Stockings” by Jessica Swale, that tells of the first female students at Cambridge University.

But it’s the last in the trio of supernaturally charged Shakespeares that promises to break fresh theatrical ground. In what represents her first-everstab (you’ll forgive the word in context) at directing, the much-laureled actress Eve Best will stage a new production in June of “Macbeth.” Joseph Millson and Samantha Spiro have signed on as the murderous couple at the play’s black, bleak heart.

What prompted one of the most accomplished stage performers of her generation (an actress with an Olivier Award and two Tony nominations) to make the shift The answer was arrived at via a lengthy phone call to a remote island in Denmark, where Ms. Best, 41, is currently filming “Someone You Love” for the director Lars von Trier’s Zentropa production group. This film’s specific director is Pernille Fischer Christensen.

To hear Ms. Best describe it, she thought her time at the Globe was finished, at least for a while, following a triumphant 2011 production of “Much Ado About Nothing” in which she played Beatrice opposite Charles Edwards’s no less witty and scintillating Be! nedick. (That staging opened within days of a contrasting commercial production of the same play, with David Tennant and Catherine Tate, and trumped its starrier competitor hands down.)

“I love the Globe so much,” recalled Ms. Best, “and wanted any excuse to spend some time there, having played Beatrice which was just my most favorite part ever. But I did think I was sort of running out of parts to play for a little while until I get into the world of Cleopatra and those kinds of parts”â€"that’s to say, Shakespeare’s more senior women.

But all that was before Mr. Dromgoole surprised Ms. Best with an offer to take on the directing of the Shakespeare tragedy in which she had made her Globe debut in 2001, opposite Jasper Britton.

“I put myself forward to direct something thinking that they might say yes in a couple of years and that if they did say yes they might start me off with something light or something simpler or more obscure,” she said.

“I was not prepared forthem to turn around and say, ‘Yes, all right, and what about “Macbeth”’ Ms. Best continued, delight evident in her voice. “It took me back. My first response was: ‘Absolutely no way; you must be kidding!’”

The play is particularly challenging at the Globe. Open to the elements, the theater is a tricky fit for a text suffused with darkness, and it can be hard to focus the gathering intensity of the Macbeths’ toxic rise and fall.

“We are in the broad daylight and the open air,” Ms. Best acknowledged, “and that particular circular shape is certainly going to have a significant effect on the kind of production ours is. We can’t set it in the dark with candles, so we just have to embrace what it is that the Globe will give us: I’m very interested in just seeing the play as clearly as we possibly can and focusing on the human relationships within it.”

Mr. Dromgoole for his part said he thought Ms. Best would be able to meet the play head-on without lots of! addition! al mumbo jumbo. “I wanted someone who I thought could just let [“Macbeth”] play itself rather than forcing it down a tunnel of darkness.”

As it happens, Ms. Best has firsthand knowledge of both central roles. In addition to acting Lady Macbeth at the Globe, she participated in workshops of the play in New York with the Scottish actor Alan Cumming in which she played the title role opposite Mr. Cumming’s Lady. Mr. Cumming is soon to open his own solo take on the play on Broadway.

(For those collecting “Macbeths,” the West End is now hosting the film actor James McAvoy in a modern-dress, gory, commendably visceral version. That one, at the Trafalgar Studios, will have finished roughly two months before Ms. Best’s begins.)

“What’s really lovely about this playâ€"and all Shakespeare plays obviouslyâ€"is that they are so magnificently and eminently fexible,” said Ms. Best, who was sounding in no way deterred by other productions arriving before hers. “They can encompass 6 or 8 or 10 productions all going on at the same time, all equally fascinating, all equally interesting, with all kinds of different approaches.”

Nor was she sounding spooked by a famously hexed play that has on occasion brought disaster in its wake. Whereas theater lore, for instance, often insists that those involved with this text refer to it as “the Scottish play,” Ms. Best was having none of that.

“I’ve been saying it like mad,” she said. “If we’re going to be working on it for two months, life’s too short to be worried.”

Eve Best Returns to the Globe, This Time as a Director

LONDONâ€"The recent press conference announcing the 2013 season at Shakespeare’s Globe on one level seemed like variations on an ongoing theme.

A onetime Falstaff at this address, Roger Allam, is returning to open the season as Prospero in “The Tempest,” directed by Jeremy Herrin, while the perennial favorite, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” will be seen in May in a new staging, this time from the Globe artistic director Dominic Dromgoole. The 2011 Olivier winner Michelle Terry (“Tribes”) will play Titania.

The international season that so galvanized the space for six weeks last spring will return in a greatly pared-down form, and there will be three new plays, including one, “Blue Stockings” by Jessica Swale, that tells of the first female students at Cambridge University.

But it’s the last in the trio of supernaturally charged Shakespeares that promises to break fresh theatrical ground. In what represents her first-everstab (you’ll forgive the word in context) at directing, the much-laureled actress Eve Best will stage a new production in June of “Macbeth.” Joseph Millson and Samantha Spiro have signed on as the murderous couple at the play’s black, bleak heart.

What prompted one of the most accomplished stage performers of her generation (an actress with an Olivier Award and two Tony nominations) to make the shift The answer was arrived at via a lengthy phone call to a remote island in Denmark, where Ms. Best, 41, is currently filming “Someone You Love” for the director Lars von Trier’s Zentropa production group. This film’s specific director is Pernille Fischer Christensen.

To hear Ms. Best describe it, she thought her time at the Globe was finished, at least for a while, following a triumphant 2011 production of “Much Ado About Nothing” in which she played Beatrice opposite Charles Edwards’s no less witty and scintillating Be! nedick. (That staging opened within days of a contrasting commercial production of the same play, with David Tennant and Catherine Tate, and trumped its starrier competitor hands down.)

“I love the Globe so much,” recalled Ms. Best, “and wanted any excuse to spend some time there, having played Beatrice which was just my most favorite part ever. But I did think I was sort of running out of parts to play for a little while until I get into the world of Cleopatra and those kinds of parts”â€"that’s to say, Shakespeare’s more senior women.

But all that was before Mr. Dromgoole surprised Ms. Best with an offer to take on the directing of the Shakespeare tragedy in which she had made her Globe debut in 2001, opposite Jasper Britton.

“I put myself forward to direct something thinking that they might say yes in a couple of years and that if they did say yes they might start me off with something light or something simpler or more obscure,” she said.

“I was not prepared forthem to turn around and say, ‘Yes, all right, and what about “Macbeth”’ Ms. Best continued, delight evident in her voice. “It took me back. My first response was: ‘Absolutely no way; you must be kidding!’”

The play is particularly challenging at the Globe. Open to the elements, the theater is a tricky fit for a text suffused with darkness, and it can be hard to focus the gathering intensity of the Macbeths’ toxic rise and fall.

“We are in the broad daylight and the open air,” Ms. Best acknowledged, “and that particular circular shape is certainly going to have a significant effect on the kind of production ours is. We can’t set it in the dark with candles, so we just have to embrace what it is that the Globe will give us: I’m very interested in just seeing the play as clearly as we possibly can and focusing on the human relationships within it.”

Mr. Dromgoole for his part said he thought Ms. Best would be able to meet the play head-on without lots of! addition! al mumbo jumbo. “I wanted someone who I thought could just let [“Macbeth”] play itself rather than forcing it down a tunnel of darkness.”

As it happens, Ms. Best has firsthand knowledge of both central roles. In addition to acting Lady Macbeth at the Globe, she participated in workshops of the play in New York with the Scottish actor Alan Cumming in which she played the title role opposite Mr. Cumming’s Lady. Mr. Cumming is soon to open his own solo take on the play on Broadway.

(For those collecting “Macbeths,” the West End is now hosting the film actor James McAvoy in a modern-dress, gory, commendably visceral version. That one, at the Trafalgar Studios, will have finished roughly two months before Ms. Best’s begins.)

“What’s really lovely about this playâ€"and all Shakespeare plays obviouslyâ€"is that they are so magnificently and eminently fexible,” said Ms. Best, who was sounding in no way deterred by other productions arriving before hers. “They can encompass 6 or 8 or 10 productions all going on at the same time, all equally fascinating, all equally interesting, with all kinds of different approaches.”

Nor was she sounding spooked by a famously hexed play that has on occasion brought disaster in its wake. Whereas theater lore, for instance, often insists that those involved with this text refer to it as “the Scottish play,” Ms. Best was having none of that.

“I’ve been saying it like mad,” she said. “If we’re going to be working on it for two months, life’s too short to be worried.”